The Start of the Hunt
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: The first Predator is heading for Earth to begin its fateful hunt.


Disclaimer - I don't own the Predator franchise in anyway, though if I had my way the last movie would never have been made; the CGI effects looked horrendous!

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The Start of the Hunt.

The Predator felt the ship shudder as it emerged out of hyperspace, and he quickly interfaced with the ship's main computer via his helmet on thought command. The ship had dropped out of hyperspace in the shadow of Earth's moon as an added precaution to make sure the humans and their growing technology level picked up the ship, augmenting the screens which rendered the ship invisible. Through the deck plates, it could feel the thrum of the sub-light engines as the ships drive switched from hyperspace engines to impeller drive.

The Predator trilled as it examined its weapons, running its clawed hands across the wrist blades, its scales scraping gently across the honed and sharpened metal, anticipating using the blades and its plasma caster during its next hunt. The Predator's mental access to the ship's computer via the connection in its helmet informed the hunter he only had a small amount of time before the shuttle was launched into Earth's orbit while the ship returned to hyperspace on its journey to other planets favoured by other hunters where they would begin hunting down the game on those worlds, as opposed to those…hunters, the Predator inside the capsule thought with distaste at the thought of those rival clans who kidnapped aliens from different worlds and deposited them on deserted worlds where they would be hunted down, where the hunters believed their prey would be struggling to adapt to their new surroundings, just to make things interesting.

But the distasteful aspect about that practice was it was done without any care at all about the glories of the hunt. In the mind of the Predator and in many of its species, the best place to hunt the game was to do so on their own planets, in places where the game believed they were the masters.

After it had checked its weapons and the light-bending camouflage screen generator built into its wrist gauntlet, and after finishing the last-moment checks into the surgical instruments and the solvent liquids and gases which would polish collected trophies, the Predator sat crosslegged on the deck plates as it awaited the release of the shuttle which would automatically enter the atmosphere of Earth to begin the hunt, and it took a few deep breaths of its artificial air, entering a brief meditative trance to cleanse its mind of all thought as it prepared to hunt.

When the shuttle was detached and it's computer automatically set a course for the appropriate landing site where the light-bending camouflage screens would prevent the humans from finding the small ship.

The Predator didn't need to do anything. It trilled softly to itself, generating a high-pitched note by clicking its mandibles, letting the sound rise in its throat. It was the sound of anticipation. The sound of eagerness. The sound of excitement as it awaited the thrill and the excitement of the hunt.

While many hunters of its breed would question why the Predator continued heading to the same jungle on Earth where the human creatures were currently fighting a very small and fairly insignificant war compared to the previous conflicts in Earth's turbulent history, the hunter's reasons for visiting that particular patch on Earth was because it was trying to become a better hunter for other conflicts. There never seemed to be an end to the number of conflicts fought on this seemingly insignificant, backwater planet.

The Predator had already made up its mind to stop hunting in this jungle on Earth and move to one of the cities if a conflict ensued, but for now, it wanted to make its last hunt of this particular jungle a memorable one. As it took deep breaths as it sat in its meditative state, the Predator hoped this hunt would be more challenging. One of the reasons it had returned time and time again to this part of Earth was there were some human who was a naturally extremely gifted warriors and when they realised they were being stalked, they always made things interesting as the alien made its presence known to them, and that was the exciting part, letting them know there was something nearby hunting them down, something far more dangerous and malevolent than their human enemies.

For thousands of centuries, the Predator's species had been hunting dangerous species throughout the universe. They were a race of warriors who occasionally took part in interstellar or intergalactic wars, though truthfully the Predators would watch and prey on the different sides of a conflict, using their light-bending camouflage screens to their advantage while they stalked and eliminated the warriors of various races. In space, on planets, it didn't matter to a race which sought to prove itself by staling warriors, other predators like themselves, and there was no greater satisfaction to be found than the final lethal fight between hunter and the hunter's quarry before the hunter took the trophy, the skull and the spinal column of the defeated creature.

Once the trophies had been properly cleaned and polished, they would take their place in the quarters of the hunter to serve as accomplishments to signify the hunter was a master of the species, and as status. The more aggressive and intelligently cunning the prey, the better, and you could find those qualities in sentient life-forms, especially in humans.

When the Predator thought about it humans were not too dissimilar to themselves; both races were bipedal, highly intelligent and cunning, both of them masters of their environments which they had both fought to tame over the centuries. While they valued their intelligence by naming their race in one of their ancient languages 'wise man,' their aggressive instincts were far more developed.

For thousands of years, the humans had fought and killed one another, establishing intricate patterns of dominance. They had refined their methods of warfare, which accelerated their technological growth; other the centuries they had developed firearms which were so crude they only fired a single projectile and propelled it with a spark created by fire which ignited a simple chemical compound in the weapons, and they had developed the technology so then they could fire multiple projectiles and cause even more deaths. Now their methods of warfare were refined to the point where they were almost artistic in their methodology.

In terms of technology and science, the humans were at this point extremely primitive and inferior, but the Predators had known for many species that even an inferior race was still dangerous. One of the reasons why several hunters favoured hunting on Earth was because of how fierce the humans could be. It had been fascinating for the Predators' species to follow their development after the original hunting expedition had first landed on Earth and surveyed the planet, discovering the primitive humans who had the simplest and the crudest technologies. Feral beasts, tribal in nature, and unsophisticated, but their aggressiveness had been off the scale.

When the hunting expedition had returned to the home planet, it had claimed the humans were promising prey in the future, and over the centuries that promise had been fulfilled. Many hunters had travelled to the planet over the centuries, attracted to the planet's conflicts in hot places in order to hunt down the best warriors for trophies, and they had been rewarded with many memorable trophies.

The centuries passed…the humans developed quickly, their weapons becoming powerful enough that now they had harnessed the power of the atom and now they had reached the point they could pose a serious threat, but that was the most exciting thing. The game had become more interesting as their technology and their science grew.

There was a gentle buffering as the shuttle passed through the atmosphere, but the Predator was not concerned about that; his people had been spacefaring for centuries, the engineers who built these ships knew what they were doing, and besides the buffeting merely made the alien hunter continue with its meditations to push it into the right frame of mind to begin the hunt.

Calmly accessing the shuttle's powerful sensor beams to locate any signs of the humans fighting by detecting and tracking the heat signatures of their primitive projectile weapons and explosives, the Predator was disappointed there was little sign of activity, but it wasn't worried. In this part of the world where conflict reigned supreme, it was likely the humans who would be fighting with the inhabitants of what part of the jungle would be arriving. They always did.

In any case, even if those humans didn't arrive, the hunt would still go on, only the Predator would go for the humans in the jungle. Back on the home planet in its quarters, the hunter had covered the walls with a number of trophies of humans who used these jungles for their battlefield, trophies taken from humans whom the hunter had stalked and eliminated to determine if there were those capable of challenging it.

Occasionally the Predator was disappointed whenever the humans it encountered didn't do anything to warrant the skull and spinal column removed, but the hunts were always interesting even if the hunter's interest in this part of Earth was waning and waning quickly.

Because the Predator's helmet was connected to the shuttle's computer, the hunter was aware of how close the nosecone of the shuttle was to the ground, the automatic security systems had activated and engaged the camouflage screens to augment security even if the landing zone would be miles from any human, but precautions had to be taken; it was the code of the Predator, of the hunt. All technology of the hunter had to be kept safe, at all costs, even at the expense of the hunter's life. It was harsh, but so to were the laws of the universe.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

The Predator did not react when the inertial dampeners cushioned the landing. It merely stood up to its full and considerable height, and it opened the hatch into the outside world of the planet Earth, but the hunter paused over the threshold of the airlock entrance as it scanned the jungle. There were no heat signatures, no humans curious about the disturbance caused by the landing, but the hunter was not deterred.

Letting out a trill of anticipation, the Predator leapt forward on its powerful legs into the jungle, the airlock door sealing behind it, beginning the hunt.

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Until the next time.


End file.
